


True Faith

by Asterism (cslily)



Category: Diabolik Lovers
Genre: Canon - Anime, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-26
Updated: 2016-05-26
Packaged: 2018-07-10 10:14:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6979537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cslily/pseuds/Asterism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The story of Adam and Eve is a story about the dangers of irrationality. To humans, Eve is all that pulls the soul earthward and Adam is that which aspires to heaven. For all of Adam's gifts and intellect that God had given him, he was expelled from paradise for the sake of a woman.  They were both cursed with mortality and no longer able to live in accordance with the will of God.”</p>
<p>“….Ruki …. makes it sound… like… a bad story...”</p>
            </blockquote>





	True Faith

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Milton allusions ahead.

The garden lay in ruins.

 Ruki Mukami walked alone, picking his way carefully around fallen branches and broken flagstones. He looked intensely at the ground, trying to divine what direction the wolves had come from, but they had left no trails or footprints to give themselves away.

 A cold wind was blowing, whistling around broken stone and fallen limbs, through the shattered glass of the greenhouse and ruined walls.

 Broken briars still clung desperately around what was left of the masonry. So much broken fruit was on the ground that it looked as if it had rained. The tomatoes had burst into watery pulp with tender unformed seeds. The cucumbers and okra and bell peppers had fared no better. He stepped near a watermelon that bled into the ground, still pale and small. All the plants that his brother had started from seeds in his green house and watched over like a mother duck, coaxing them from tender curls with their first leaves. He had rushed out at every hint of a storm in spring to cover them in tarps to protect them from the winds once they were sturdy enough to take root in the garden. He had raged and cursed and brandished his hoe at the small stray rabbits that came to pillage the lettuces and coriander.

 His brother had loved this place, had fought for it, but it wasn't enough. He doubted anything could be salvaged here.

  _It will be easier for him if he hears it from me_ , Ruki thought.

 He knew his brothers. They looked to him for guidance. They studied his face for tension tics, for scowling, for whether he blinked too much or not enough. They noticed if he spoke too rapidly, noticed the pitch of his voice. They would only be at ease if he maintained his composure. That was how things had always been between them.

 He had pressed his jacket before dinner so they would not see him looking disheveled. He had had Yui help him with his shirt and tie and to make sure that it was buttoned to cover the bandages across his chest and shoulder. He braced himself against the marble countertops while he simmered the veal for blanquette de veau and sent Azusa and Kou to pick out a chardonnay from the cellars while he grit his teeth through whisking the roux. Then they had had dinner together, he and his family and their erstwhile guest, with that cold wind howling all around them, whistling through broken windows.

 Old rituals were important during uncertain times.

 The weather was quickly changing, and the moon was red. His old scars ached alongside his newer wounds. It was a familiar pain, one that he had carried with him into his life as a vampire. His body liked to remind him of how weak and fragile he had once been.

 In truth, it was the pain in his chest that had driven him out into the cold wind. It was better if his brothers didn't see his shoulders curling forward, caving in his chest as he sat with them after dinner, or the trembling in his hands as he held his book.

 He had insisted that they stay inside and rest as much as possible while he went to survey the mansion’s grounds.

 He left them all gathered together in the sitting room, all of them still smelling of after-dinner coffee and the antiseptic that Yui had brought out to tend to his brothers' scratches earlier. Kou flipping his hair and rubbing the back of his neck, Azusa slumping in his seat as if trying to make himself invisible. Yuma scowling and crossing and uncrossing his arms and legs, and demanding that the others help him eat all the ice cream left in the house, because he could never abide seeing food go to waste, pushing cartons of strawberry and green tea and rum raisin at Azusa and Yui and even _him._

 The fact that they were so calm this night was probably because they had the girl here with them again. She was a welcome distraction, with her soft eyes and sweet attractive smell, her light voice and her fingers loosely clasped in her lap as she sat with them.

 They looked to her too now.

 

Rukilet out a long exhale and tipped his head back to look skyward. The wind was strong enough to push the clouds in the sky towards the horizon. When he looked at the stars, nothingwas clear. He could see no path ahead.

 Ruki clutched his book at his side. He had carried it with him when he strode out of the sitting room, in his haste he had not stopped to put it down and mark his page. It was an old book, one of the oldest in his library. The gilded title was fractured, flaking away from the leather. He kept it under glass in his rarest collection.

 He had always taken comfort in old stories, and this was one of the oldest he had managed to keep with him through the years. He hadn't thought he would be able to hold onto it forever.

 This wasn’t the first manor that Ruki had seen laid to ruins. He’d left homes behind him broken by fires, by revolutions. Sometimes simply because He had ordered them to resettle elsewhere and cover their tracks behind them.

 The only place that he remembered with fond attachment, as well as equal parts rage and misery, was the orphanage where he had met his brothers. That place only was home to him, because it was the site where he had first heard His words and been turned into a creature in His image.

 The girl said her prayers to God each night. There had been an era when Ruki had taken part in the sacraments and recited his catechisms by heart as well, because that was the proper thing for young scions of noble families, but that had been a very long time ago.

 'God' was simply a word to him now. The word for such a being was similar in most of the languages he had studied through the years—'gud' in Scandanavian, 'goth' in Old Norse, 'god' in English. In Old Irish, 'guth' came from the word for _voice_.

 It was the voice of Karlheinz that he had put his faith in. It was His word that had been their beginning, and they had never questioned it until recently. It was His silence, as their mission had run its course and their failure was more apparent every day, that had broken Ruki and caused him to shut out his brothers while he rested his head in his hands with his breath shaking and a strange pain in the back of his throat for days. Unblinking, he had watched the hands of clock in his room tick through the hours.

 The silence remained constant even now with the Founders at their gates, testing them. He may have truly abandoned them to their fate.

 Ruki rubbed at his arm. The pain in his chest was maddening. From the wolf's bite. From other reasons.

 He looked up to the lit windows of the mansion, his eyes seeking out one light in particular. Perhaps she was saying her prayers before she slept.

 “Ruki … is watching Eve too?” The soft, slow voice came from behind him. Azusa.

 His youngest brother stepped towards him in the darkness. Azusa looked at him with an unfocused, watery gaze and his lank hair didn't quite hide the deep circles under his eyes. He was worse for wear since the attack on the manor, but now he smelled of antiseptic and fresh gauze. The girl was determined to keep Azusa from falling apart, despite himself. She had even mended his coat.

 Ruki nodded in greeting. “Is she sleeping?”

 Azusa smiled slightly and his eyes brightened as he nodded in affirmation. He cradled his bandaged arm tenderly, lightly stroking a cut on his hand. It was a defensive wound acquired just after they had first acquired her.

 “Eve... should have... flowers... in her room. I…. wanted... to find some... for her. ...There aren’t many left….”

 Azusa had never called the girl anything but Eve. He was too kind.

 “Do you remember the story of the Fall, Azusa?”

 “...I do. ...Ruki taught it to me…. When he taught me to read…. “ A fragile waterstained bible had been the only book they were allowed to keep in the orphanage together.

 “What do you remember about it?”

 Azusa cocked his head to the side, thinking and rubbing a hand against his heart. “...He for God only… she for… God in him...”

 Ruki sighed shallowly and looked at his brother. “I think I may have asked too much of you and the others, to try to become Adam.”

 “...Why… Ruki?”

 “The story of Adam and Eve is a story about the dangers of irrationality. To humans, Eve is all that pulls the soul earthward and Adam is that which aspires to heaven. For all of Adam's gifts and intellect that God had given him, he was expelled from paradise for the sake of a woman. They were both cursed with mortality and no longer able to live in accordance with the will of God.”

 “….Ruki …. makes it sound… like… a bad story...”

 “What do you mean?”

 “Eve...” Azusa said, softly stroking a cut on his hand. “Adam … made … her pain… his own… because he loved her. ...That was … good, ...wasn’t it?”

 Ruki sighed. “I may have led you astray.”

 “...Ruki … is afraid… that he's acting against Karlheinz's wishes?”

 Ruki's answer to his brother died in his throat when an intruding voice broke his train of thought. 

 “Trying to be a good little boy and kissing that old bastard’s ass won’t get you anywhere. He doesn’t give a shit.”

 Sakamaki Ayato strode towards him, vines cracking under his trainers, carelessly trampling his way across the garden. There was an air of chaos about him. His rumpled shirt, the tie loose and lax around his neck, the tousled hair. It spoke of a general loathing of restraint, conspicuous defiance of the tyranny of buttons and half-windsors. He wore his carelessness as a costume.

 The boy had a talent for sniffing him out at his weakest moments. He had a fine predatory instinct.

 Ruki's eyes narrowed and he looked at Ayato directly in the eye. “Don’t speak like you know anything.” He spoke to the boy in an even tone. He wasn't one to be cowed by sophomoric posturing.

 He could not help but think of Ayato as a boy. They were not so different in age, but there was a vague childish air about him. A sulk of the shoulders, a petulance in his sneer. He walked with his hands curled into tight fists and his chest thrust out, trying to make himself taller. Ayato locked his eyes onto Ruki's, the way a street dog would challenge another.

 He stopped before him, tossing his hair and taking a wide stance. Ruki had seen that brand of posturing in the orphanage. The posturing children were never the ones to worry about.

 Boys who actually expected a fight and were serious about being the one to walk away made themselves small, crouching or turning themselves to the side to present a smaller target. Azusa was doing so now.

 Ruki silently dissuaded Azusa from provoking him with a subtle shake of his head. He saw Azusa's hands relax,where they had been ready to procure one of the small knives he kept on his person.

 “Why are you here?” Ruki asked with all the civility he could muster. There was a dangerous and fragile peace between them since they had taken the girl’s blood together in a perverse communion, and he was determined not to be the one to break it.

 “You have some guts to ask me that. You're the one that can't keep his hands off what's mine.” Ayato said.

 “I want her,” Ruki said simply.

 “No shit. What’s so special about her? Do you think you could be like us if you have her blood? That your little family might go up in rank if you have a bride of your own? Is that what he promised you?” Ayato sneered, showing fangs.

 Ruki clenched his hands around the book at his side, gritted his teeth.

 Sakamaki Ayato, that prideful, damned little _shit_ , had been an annoyance for some time. Ruki knew he was one of Karlheinz's natural sons with a devil queen, and that the children he had spawned with her were infamous even among vampire kind. There were many rumors about the King's children and their perverse ways—that they were monstrous or insane or both, that they went through their sacrificial brides like so much candy. Ruki had never thought it his placeto question why his lord had lain with that monstrous woman, or why he had conceivedthose three foul terrors with her, but this one's existence had become bothersome.

 “Ayato, why are you here?” Ruki asked again, his tone still carefully controlled.

 “Maybe I just want to try killing a founder.” The boy looked away with an affected shrug of his shoulders.

 Ruki snapped. “I'll tell you _exactly_ why you are here here.” He spun around and flung his book at the boy's feet, where it landed with a muted thump and a fluttering of pages. “I've been rereading the Illiad lately. You may have heard of it. In it, there is a slave girl called Briseis, who was given to Achilles as a war prize. If she had stayed at his side as his slave, she would have no bearing on the story and would be worth nothing. But Agamemnon took her from him. Then, and _only_ then, she was suddenly worth _everything_.”

 “Go fuck yourself. You don't know anything.” Ayato kicked the book defiantly and smiled his challenge at him.

 “You would have killed her already if your father hadn't forbidden it.”

 Ayato stepped towards him, uncomfortably close. “Maybe you should finish reading. Agamemnon didn’t get to keep that broad.”

 “Oh?”

 “Don’t look so shocked. There was a time when I was interested in getting cookies from Daddy, and he loved that Greekshit. Do you guys call him Daddy? Yeah, I bet you do. Anyway… I had to memorize the whole damned thing. I know all about Achilles, how his old lady dunked him in a fountain to make him less of a pussy.”

 “It was a river. Thetis burned away Achilles' mortality with fire and then she held him by the heel and dipped him in the water of the river Styx in the underworld to make him invulnerable.”

 Ayato glared at him murderously. “Don't fucking interrupt me! Anyway… Agamemnon. He gave her back to Achilles in the end. Made a big fucking speech to all his men about what a dumbass he’d been to take her in the first place. Even swore up and down that he’d never even shared a bed with her. You know why, don't you? Because Achilles was the only thing stopping his army from getting completely buttfucked by the Trojans!”

 “...That may have been true. However...do you remember at all if the slave girl loved Achilles enough to _want_ to return to him? Or was that not an important detail?”

 “Go fuck yourself. I’m tired of you.”

 Ayato turned on his heel to stalkaway, crackinga branch with his shoulder. He gave Azusa a sharp shove against his chest when he passed him, making him stagger backwards.

 Ruki sighed, his eyes following Ayato's back as he receded into the dark.

 “You made him... angry,” said Azusa.

 “More than that, I think.” There had been true hurt in his eyes. Ruki nodded towards the direction that he had disappeared. “Watch him. Make sure the wrath of our Achilles doesn’t trouble the girl tonight.”

 Azusa nodded and vanished, leaving Ruki was alone again. He looked down at his book, fallen in the mud at his feet.

 Ruki raked a hand through his hair and rubbed his forehead. If he was lucky, the founders might rid him of this annoyance.

 In truth, Ayato had surprised him. He had been an interruptions in his calculations ever since he and his brothers had first set their sights on Eve. The attack on the limo had been a touch dramatic, because it had been Kou's idea, but Ruki had allowed it for a reason he had kept to himself. He wanted to see who among the King's children would save her, who might try to stop them. Who would be their rival.

 It was Sakamaki Ayato.

 To say he was difficult to predict was an understatement. Never in a million years would Ruki have imagined playing host to this brute child, who put his feet up on the coffee table in the sitting room, trying to take up as much space as possible, and had Yui sit with him perched on the arm of his chair.

 What was he? What was he to her? Did he have anything near his heart to give to have her by his side? Was there even a chance she could have been happy with him, if not for the moment when Ruki had slipped his arms around her from behind and covered her eyes, whispering for her to choose him?

 Ruki remembered how she was when she first came to them. How she cringed and cowered like a whipped dog. How clumsy and halting her movements were. How she lingered silently in doorways before she entered a room, taking stock of all the other doors and windows, always preparing herself to run. How her chin trembled. How sometimes she would simply freeze, rooted to the spot where she stood. How she stood with her elbows pressed to her sides, making herself small. How she flinched at noises that came from behind her.

 She had the grace and bearing of any simple prey animal.

 When he brought her to his bed the first night she stayed with them, she curled herself small and still and clung to the edge of the bed, and she did not sleep. She had learned to keep still, to make herself small. A little rabbit tossed to the dogs that knew it had nowhere to run.

 He had lain next to her, unable to sleep much himself with her heartbeat pounding wildly so near him. He thought of the sweetness of her blood on his tongue, but he did not take any more from her despite the aching thirst that welled in him. He looked away and did not touch her at all. The way she had looked at him had unnerved him.

 Her former masters had broken her, and he himself had silenced her by naming her with a word once used to degrade him.

 And yet…

 She was able to find the words to question him about the scars on his back.

 She told him that they looked like an angel's wings.

 How he had hated her for that. _How dare she._ To show him eyes full of sympathy, as if he were a fellow mistreated animal. He was content to avoid her for some time after while his brothers handled her.

 Over time, after she had taken her place at their table during their dinners and found the sunlight in their gardens agreeable, she came to be more comfortable among them. There was more lightness in her voice. Sometimes when she smiled it was no longer forced and pained.

 She had still been smiling just before he took her to the manor's dungeon in his desperation, when he was facing the possibility that He had abandoned them and the task set before them was impossible to achieve.

 She showed surprise at his betrayal, but no anger. She looked at him with pity in her eyes. It was as laughable as a cow showing concern for the axeman. He was her predator. She was his livestock. He would not tolerate her seeing past the roles he had defined for the two of them, or that she somehow saw the anger that he would never allow himself to feel towards Him being turned on himself, that she saw the frightened child whose father was abandoning him again.

 She did not fight him. He hated her for that too. The peace she had made with herself disgusted him.

 How much had he changed that to see that look in her eyes again had moved him, in the end? What had happened to him that now he was willing to fight to keep it?

 Up until just days ago, he had thought himself a rational man.

 He was no stranger to disillusionment and ruin. As a child he had learned how useless it was to trust in the hearts of others. Charity was a pretense. Love was a farce. When inspectors arrived at the orphanage they had all been lined up in neat rows in the courtyard with the wind biting their cheeks red and forced to sing to show their gratitude that they had been saved, while the armed guards watched from the gatehouse. Mercy, pity, peace and love were pleasant delusions that kept sick systems in place.

 And yet…

 When Karlheinz called them to his side and bound them with his words and his blood, he accepted the pact wholeheartedly. They were born again to live their lives in service to His designs, even when He chose not to share his final objective. Some part of him had still needed to believe that there was order in the world and a purpose for their lives.

 Just days ago, one ephemeral shadow of a familiar outside his window was enough to make the entire world look like bitter ash, and the stars in the sky like so many judging, fiery eyes.

 He had thought himself cast off and abandoned. His shame had nearly destroyed him.

 And then...

 With just a few words from her, the world remade itself around him. He saw his brothers gathered together and wishing desperately to support him, despite his efforts to isolate himself. Even with no word from Karlheinz to guide them and no clear role to play, no design apparent, no illusion of self-mastery left and his fate uncertain and his house in ruins, he had them. And he had her there at his side, Komori Yui, his Eve, supporting his weight with surprising strength when he pulled her into his embrace, the first loving touch he had shared with anyone in many years. And he was happy.

 What was she that he would choose her over Karlheinz himself?

 She had every right to hate him. She had every right to hate all of them. For imprisoning her, for breaking her, for degrading her. She could burn them all alive and her God himself would call it justice.

 She endured it all without any trace of spite or hellfire in her heart. He thought he would never understand her, how she could make any meaning out of the pitiful role she'd been given when He had raised her up from the dust to set her at the side of his sons.

 He still didn't understand her, but he saw now that she had a gift for making a heaven out of hell. She could see family where there was ruin. She could see angel wings where there were scars.

 For that, he loved her.

 He hoped that Azusa was correct about the old story, and that Adam was right to love Eve enough to take a bite of the apple alongside her. Her pain and her fate was his as well now.

 Ruki turned away from the dark and his broken-spined book that lay on the ground. He looked up to the sky and the dim, faint stars. He thought of his Eve, laying sweetly in her bed and dreaming of her apple tree with her hands clasped loosely against her chest, her golden tresses disheveled in wanton ringlets, and, suddenly, all the stars looked beautiful. How strange it was that a single thought, a single impulse, a single girl could make so much difference. He was happy. He turned his face upwards to the warm lights pouring out of the windows in his brothers' room and hers, and he basked in that light falling across him while he could.

 There would be devils coming for them soon.


End file.
